Re: [PATCH] Lindent: Handle missing indent gracefully

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Fri, 2015-07-10 at 14:37 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jul 2015 10:04:07 -0700 Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Le Friday 10 July 2015 __ 04:51 -0700, Joe Perches a __crit :
> > > > On Fri, 2015-07-10 at 13:47 +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > > > > If indent is not found, bail out immediately instead of spitting
> > > > > random shell script error messages.
> > > > 
> > > > OK, but can't we just delete Lindent instead?
> > > 
> > > Because...?
> > 
> > It's just not very useful in today's development space.
> 
> I've very occasionally used Lindent.  It's useful if the input is an
> utter mess.  You feed it through Lindent as a first pass then get in and
> do the remainder by hand.
> 
> It can be less work than doing the whole conversion by hand.

That's true, it can be, but I think Lindent mostly
doesn't work particularly well for reviewing and
it can require a lot more rework.

My biggest complaint about Lindent is that it can
produce _awful_ looking code when it has to wrap
longish lines.

I think that generally, checkpatch --fix-inplace
works better and it can work in discrete steps.

I submitted a little script a while back that does
most of what Lindent does.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/7/11/794

uncrustify also kinda works without the line
wrapping nuttiness.  It's not very good about
using Linux's pointer location style.

http://uncrustify.sourceforge.net/

clang-format works reasonably well.
It can respect existing line wrapping.

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormatStyleOptions.html